+Stuart Hall – Encoding/Decoding

Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and Professor of Sociology at the Open University.

Stuart Hall looked at the role of audience positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by different social groups. Hall came up with a model suggesting three ways in which we may read a media text:

 

+Encoding and decoding

Dominant reading- reader fully accepts the preferred reading (audience will read the text the way the author intended them to) so that the code seems natural and transparent.

The negotiated reading – the reader partly believes the code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests. 

The oppositional reading – the readers social position places them in an oppositional relation to the dominant code. They reject the reading.

+Media Power

Hall was concerned with media power, including how it propagates particular social values, to create dominant ideologies (in other words framing public debate surrounding certain issues; e.g. the role of women in society, asylum and immigration, the welfare system, the monarchy etc...)

He believes that the mass media create and define issues of public concern and interest through audience positioning.

Polysemy- is the capacity for a text to have multiple meanings. It is to do with how individuals interpret and decode readings in different contexts and cultures.